Mary Schmich:
It’s a first for Rivet: Our first Pulitzer Prize winner. (We’re so new, almost every interview is a first. We’ve already had our first Kennedy, our first musician, our first dog ...)
It’s journalist Mary Schmich ... who joined the Chicago Tribune as a reporter in 1985 ...then became a columnist for the paper in 1992 and (except for a year off to attend Harvard) ... has held that job ever since.
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First things first: How do you pronounce “Pulitzer”?
What was it like to win that award in 20-12?
And now you have a book out, “Even the Terrible Things Seem Beautiful to Me Now: The Best of Mary Schmich.” What’s in it?
You’ve been in Chicago almost thirty years now, so it’s hard for a lot of us to imagine you had a career before Chicago ... and that you were born in Savannah, Georgia. How’d you wind up here? And why’d you decide to stay here?
In a career of decades, how many columns have you written?
Was it tough to narrow down to just (what, 164) columns?
I should disclose here that Mary and I were coworkers at Tribune Co. for just a sliver of Mary’s tenure --13 years (-- and STILL she agreed to come on this show with me!) I was a senior producer for chicagotribune.com for much of that time. We saw the company -- and journalism -- go through a lot of changes over the years. Compare now to the days when you started.
I remember back to the days when we first started to get data on how many people were reading each story -- or in your case, each column. What do you remember about that transition?
Do you pay attention now to the readership numbers on your columns?
Does that affect what you write and how you write it?
I imagine you, like a lot of writers, get tired of this one. But it’s of endless fascination to your fans: Where do you get your ideas, and what do you do when you don’t have any?
For the last 28 of its 60-year run, you were also the writer of the comic strip “Brenda Starr,” about a pioneering woman (“girl”) reporter. It ended in 20-11. Do you miss Brenda? If you were still writing it, where would she be now?
And no interview with Mary Schmich would be complete without discussing your authorship of that famous column so often confused with the work of Kurt Vonnegut, “Wear Sunscreen.” That’s in the book, right? Walk us through that story, start to present.
What a career: Hit record, comic-strip author, Pulitzer-winning columnist. What’s next?
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It’s Panorama on Rivet. I’m Charlie Meyerson, talking to Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich.
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Our guest has been Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, recorded February 3, 2014. For more of Mary’s work, tap the headline, then tap Read the Full Story. I’m Charlie Meyerson, this is Panorama, and you’re listening to ... Rivet.
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